4 ms·
There is a lot of legacy cruft in x86, but it's the devil we know. After decades of use, we are still discovering vulnerabilities, in a platform thought to be w
by outworlder 8y ago
There is a lot of legacy cruft in x86, but it's the devil we know. After decades of use, we are still discovering vulnerabilities, in a platform thought to be well-understood.
The closest alternative would be ARM. In any case, it's a massive undertaking.
- gaius 8y agoThe closest alternative would be ARM On the contrary there's SPARC, MIPS, PA-RISC, POWER and a whole heap of others that perhaps were written off prematurely. Need to move quickly tho' while some vestiges of expertise still remain.
- Aloha 8y agoI'd argue that POWER is still alive and well.
- LeftTurnSignal 8y agoWe just bought a brand new POWER 7. The vendor has no plans to move to another architecture (that I could get out of them anyway).
- rurban 8y agoSparc, Tilera and Parallela are unfortunately gone. I had high hopes into the latter two, esp. since Grid CPU's are perfect for machine learning. Much better than GPU's.
- gaius 8y agoFujitsu still have SPARC on their roadmap http://www.fujitsu.com/global/products/computing/servers/unix/sparc/key-reports/roadmap/ http://www.fujitsu.com/global/products/computing/servers/uni...
- rurban 8y agoRoadmap yes, but Linux support no. https://wiki.debian.org/Sparc64 https://wiki.debian.org/Sparc64
- Ar-Curunir 8y agothe problem is that hte platform is not well-understood. The design is convoluted and often not well-principled.
- lvh 8y agoIt is not obvious to me that it's the design warts of x86_64 (wholeheartedly agreed--I don't like x86_64 either) are the cause of the security problems we're seeing. Other architectures also have speculative execution and multiple rings. It's a lot easier to avoid vulns that are a consequence of increased performance demands when performance is not the primary reason people pick your platform.